20 years ago, if you recognized how deep America’s problems were, it was easy to feel like you were the crazy one.
Banks were handing out mortgages to people who plainly couldn’t afford them. Wall Street bundled those mortgages by the millions and sold them on as some of the safest investments around. And the whole structure rested on the assumption that home prices would never fall, so a bank could simply sell the home for more in case of a default.
Chief among the “experts” selling this fiction was Ben Bernanke, then chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, who said in 2005, “We’ve never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis.”
In March 2007, with subprime loans already going bad, Bernanke, by then Fed Chairman, told Congress the damage “seems likely to be contained.”
That May he said he didn’t expect “significant spillovers… to the rest of the economy.”
As late as July 2008, weeks before the two mortgage giants collapsed into government hands, he called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac adequately capitalized and in no danger of failing.
Then on September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in US history, and the structure came down. Prices fell, those homes were suddenly worth less than the loans against them, and the safest investments around turned toxic.
By 2009, Washington was spending, bailing out, and printing at record scale, and the obvious question was how long it could possibly go on.
That was the world the very first Sovereign Man letter dropped into, in June 2009, exactly 17 years ago.
We wrote about a real man named William “Bud” Post who had gone flat broke, on food stamps, with lawsuits, jail time, and bankruptcy behind him. What made it strange was that in 1988 he’d won $16.2 million in the Pennsylvania lottery.
Bud, we wrote, is the United States of America.
America hit its own lottery after World War II, coming out the only major economy left standing, the dollar enthroned as the world’s reserve currency. And like Bud, it spent the next several decades certain the money would never run out.
LBJ got bogged down in Vietnam while building the Great Society. George W. Bush entered two wars and told Americans to go shopping, and Obama, fresh off the bailouts, was promising universal healthcare.
It was the steady avoidance of every hard choice. We called it winner’s syndrome: “we’ve been winners for so long we don’t know any other reality.”
In 2009, that was an unpopular thing to say.
The consensus treated the crisis as a stumble the economy would walk off, and calling America structurally broke got you labeled a crank.
We didn’t say it was a death sentence, though. We argued the opposite, that clear thinking could still save America: take the hit, let failing businesses fail, restructure, and come out stronger.
“Unfortunately,” we wrote, “there are no near-term indications of rationality in Washington.”
17 years later, that is more true than ever. If anything, Washington has gone backwards.
For example, Social Security’s own trustees now project the main retirement trust fund runs dry in 2032, after which scheduled benefits get cut by roughly 22% automatically.
That’s not some distant future where maybe at some point someone will have to start thinking about a solution. It is 6 years away.
And the fixes are no secret; the trustees themselves lay out the options, from higher payroll taxes to benefit cuts.
But they’ve ignored it for so long that simply hearing a few members of Congress acknowledge the scale of the problem now feels like progress, even though acknowledging it is a long way from fixing it.
We were early; the reckoning we kept warning about has taken longer to arrive than we thought.
But early isn’t wrong: everything that first letter described is more true today than it was in 2009. Washington could still choose to fix it, exactly as it could have back then. It simply has to want to, and seventeen years of evidence says it doesn’t.
Your Plan B, fortunately, doesn’t require Congress to find its courage.
And that was the entire reason this company was founded.
That was the promise at the end of that first letter: while the country may be on a slide, clear thinking could still save you, “and that’s where we come in.”
That’s still exactly what we do.
Sovereign Man grew into Schiff Sovereign, and one daily letter became a full body of research.
Every month, our co-founder James Hickman gives his in-depth view of the world in the Macro Brief, mapping where the debt, the dollar, and global events are heading. He points to specific real assets that can protect your savings; the gold, energy, and resource businesses that hold their value as the dollar slips.
It’s available to members of Premium for just $9 per month.
Members of our flagship membership, Plan B Confidential, get even more.
This is the original idea the first letter was built on: don’t put all your eggs in one basket, and don’t hand one government the keys to your entire life. Plan B Confidential is the playbook for second citizenship so you always have another way out, foreign residency so you always have another place to live, offshore banking so your savings aren’t trapped in one banking system, and the legal tax strategy that lets you keep as much of your money as possible.
It’s built on boots-on-the-ground research across more than 120 countries.
And because so much of the threat from a bankrupt government printing money and draining the value of your savings is financial, we’ve zeroed in on real assets through our investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets.
A real asset is something with worth of its own, the kind of thing people need no matter what the dollar is doing: gold as a store of value, energy, the metals that build everything. A government can print money by the trillion, but it can’t print an ounce of gold or a barrel of oil, so real assets tend to hold their value, and often climb, exactly when paper money is falling apart.
And for readers who want it all, we offer Total Access.
Members get everything we publish, from the macro analysis to the investment research, and all the international strategies in between.
But Total Access members also get the community: other members who they meet at in-person events, conferences, dinners, and most recently, small group boots-on-the-ground trips around the world.
From a superyacht along the Croatian coast to a trek through the Patagonian Andes, members explore the world together, and finally find their tribe in each other.
That’s the part we could never have planned 17 years ago.
Back then, we wrote to a handful of people willing to question what everyone else accepted as obvious. You were one of them, or you found your way here since, because you see the world through that same lens.
That’s what built this. Not us. You.
Here’s to the next chapter.
